Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  It is this lack of access to state power and African American nationalists’ advocacy of an oppressed people that gives Afrocentric ideology its progressive, radical edge and ultimately distinguishes it from European and Euro-American bourgeois nationalism. Paradoxically then, Afrocentric ideology can be radical and progressive in relation to white racism and conservative and repressive in relation to the internal organization of the black community. Clearly, nationalists struggle in a way that can deeply threaten white racism. Both the open repression and the ideological backlash against nationalists indicate that their discourse strikes at the heart of black oppression. Yet I often find too narrow black nationalist efforts to define what the community or nation should be. In particular many nationalists attempt to construct sexist and heterosexist ideal models for appropriate behavior.

  THE DIALECTICS OF DISCURSIVE STRUGGLE

  How does one prove strength in oppression without overstating the case, diluting criticism of the system and absolving the oppressor in the process? Likewise, the parallel dilemma is how does one critique the system and state of things without contributing to the victimology school, which thrives on litanies of lost battles and casualty lists, while omitting victories and strengths and the possibilities for change inherent in both black people and society? 11

  Karenga has identified a key dilemma facing black scholarship: how do black scholars take into account the possibilities of liberation at the same time that they balance a sense of strength against the realities of victimization? One strategy for moving beyond this dilemma to what Karenga calls an “emancipatory Black science” is to examine the ideological battles in which black people engage, exploring both the racist discourse that they struggle against and the oppositional language constructed in the process of this struggle. As a site of ideological battles, discourses intertwine with the material conditions of our lives. They help organize our social existence and social reproduction through the production of signs and practices that give meaning to our lives.12 Closely tied to the socioeconomic and political institutions that enable oppressive relations, discourses are often reflected in a variety of forms. For example, the dominant discourse on Africa includes multilayered interventions that are knitted together from scholarly literature, fiction, art, movies, television, media, travel books, government documents, folklore, jokes, and more. The discourse that relies on these interventions creates an image of Africa that reinforces the continent’s subordinate power relations to the West. Dominant discursive practice depends on more than lies and myths, although misrepresentation and deception do have roles to play in its strategy. Instead, the West’s will to knowledge about Africa has been inextricably bound up with imperialist relations.

  It is impossible for people’s thoughts on Africa to be unencumbered by this discourse. None of us—not even Africans—can come to the study of Africa without being influenced by its negative image. Accordingly, dominant discourse attempts to blind both the oppressor and the oppressed by setting up smokescreens between people and reality. As Said argues for the Middle East, “... for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstance of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second.”13 One way that dominant discourse sets up a smokescreen is to make arbitrary categories appear natural and normal. For example, it makes us think that race is a natural category by taking minor biological differences and infusing them with deep symbolic meanings that affect all our lives. Race, then, is a social construction that feels real to us and has significant consequences....

  The very nature of dominant discourse leads it to be contested by subordinate groups whose daily experiences help penetrate and demystify its hegemony.14 This “dialectic of discursive struggle” reveals the vulnerabilities of hegemonies.15 As part of the same dialectic, counterdiscourses operate on the same ground as dominant ideology. Scott argues:The crucial point is rather that the very process of attempting to legitimate a social order by idealizing it always provides its subjects with the means, the symbolic tools, the very ideas for a critique that operates entirely within the hegemony. For most purposes, then, it is not at all necessary for subordinate classes to set foot outside the confines of the ruling ideals in order to formulate a critique of power.16 ...

  The writings of certain feminists of color reveal the Janus-faced nature of counterdiscourse as these women search for allies among the male-dominated nationalist and white-dominated feminist movements. For example, women of color offered challenges within the feminist movement that forced women to acknowledge the problems with an undifferentiated category, Woman. Many of these theorists highlighted the complexities of human identity in recognition of the reality that women have ethnic/race and class positions, inter alia, that interact with gender and sexuality to influence their lives. Accordingly, feminists of color pushed for a movement whose discursive practices opposed sexism and racism simultaneously17 For example, Audre Lorde has asked, how does horizontal hostility keep women from ending their oppression? She argued that women need to celebrate their differences and use difference for creative dialogue18 Outside a narrow band of bourgeois or separatist-feminists, few United States white feminists today write without giving at least token acknowledgment to Lorde’s call to recognize difference.19

  At the same time, women of color challenged their various ethnic communities to become conscious of sexism at home. Cherrie Moraga problematizes the meaning of home and community as she sensitively explores the way her education and light skin pushed her away from other Chicanos. “I grew white,” she acknowledged.20 But she also stressed that her community forced her to leave home because of her feminism and lesbianism. feeling betrayed by a mother who accepted the ideology that males were better than females, she fled from those who told her, you are a traitor to your race if you do not put men first. She watched the rise of the Chicano nationalist movement, La Raza, alienated on the sidelines. Yet she found herself increasingly uncomfortable in her nearly all-white surroundings.

  Ultimately, she concluded that to be critical of one’s race is not to betray it. She joined with other Chicana feminists to turn around the traditional interpretation of Malinche’s life, which traces the birth of the Mexican people to Malinche’s betrayal of her people. Instead, Moraga and others expose a prior betrayal of Malinche, who had been sold into slavery by her own people.21 By refusing to accept the terms of a Chicago nationalist movement that brands her a traitor because she publicly criticizes gender relations, Moraga demands a place for herself and other lesbians within Chicano communities.

  It is not surprising that feminists such as Audre Lorde and Cherrie Moraga challenge both feminists and nationalist communities. As women with strong lesbian political consciences, they confront homophobia in nationalist movements. Locked in struggle against heterosexism in their own communities, it is very difficult for them to maintain an image of their communities as harmonious. Cheryl Clarke has specifically accused nationalists of increasing the level of homophobia in African American communities during the 1960s and 1970s. She argues persuasively that homophobia limits the political struggle of African Americans:The expression of homophobic sentiments, the threatening political postures assumed by black radicals and progressives of the nationalist/communist ilk, and the seeming lack of any willingness to understand the politics of gay and lesbian liberation collude with the dominant white male culture to repress not only gay men and lesbians, but also to repress a natural part of all human beings, namely the bisexual potential in us all. Homophobia divides black people as political allies, it cuts off political growth, stifles revolution, and perpetuates patriarchal domination.22

  In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby goes even further when she finds fault with some African American feminists for failing to recognize that even their writings form part of a multiaccented counterdiscourse. She cautions black feminist literary critics to be historically specific when they write
about black women’s fiction and to recognize competing interests among African American women. She asserts, “in these terms black and feminist cannot be absolute, transhistorical forms (or form) of identity.”23 Black feminists do not have an essential, biologically-based claim on understanding black women’s experience since we are divided by class, region, and sexual orientation. Even we have multiple identities that create tensions and contradictions among us. We need not all agree nor need we all speak with one voice. As with all counterdiscourses, the assumption that there exists one essential victim suppresses internal power divisions. To Terdiman’s “no discourse is ever a monologue,” we should add, the site of counterdiscourse is itself contested terrain.

  INVENTING AFRICAN TRADITION

  The contemporary African American woman must recognize that, in keeping with her African heritage and legacy, her most important responsibilities are to the survival of the home, the family, and its children.24

  It is out of the feminist tradition of challenging the oppositional discourses that are meaningful to women of color that I interrogate the significance of black nationalism for African American women’s lives. Like Sylvia Yanagisako, “I treat tradition as a cultural construction whose meaning must be discovered in present words no less than past acts.”25 As I have suggested, the traditions revealed in nationalist discursive practices are Janus-faced—turned toward struggle with oppressive forces and contesting for dominance within black communities.

  This discourse can be represented by Molefi Kete Asante’s writings and the journal he edits, Journal of Black Studies. Asante recognizes the importance of developing a counterdiscourse within the privileged arena of academia and has consistently published a high quality journal. He is also responsible for developing the first Ph.D. program in African American studies at Temple University.

  The focus of his work and his journal is an Afrocentric one because it places “Africans and the interest of Africa at the center of our approach to problem solving.”26 By African, he means both people from the African continent and its diaspora. Although he has collapsed the distinction between African Americans and Africans, he avoids the traps many nationalists fall into when they posit a simplistic, mystical connection between African and African Americans. Unlike earlier nationalists who appealed to a natural, essential element in African culture, he argues that culture “is the product of the material and human environment in which people live.”27 In an editor’s note introducing a special issue of the Journal of Black Studies, “African Cultural Dimensions,” he continues:As editor I seek to promulgate the view that all culture is cognitive. The manifestations of culture are the artifacts, creative solutions, objects, and rituals that are created in response to nature. Thus, the manuscripts which have been scrupulously selected for this issue are intended to continue the drama of cultural discussion of African themes.28

  Africans, he argues, have constructed a culture that stands in opposition to Eurocentric culture. He develops a convincing critique of a Eurocentric worldview. For Asante, Eurocentric culture is too materialistic, and the social science that has evolved from this culture in academe too often assumes an objective, universal approach that ultimately suffers from positivism. He argues that neither Marxism nor Freudianism escape from this shortcoming though he acknowledges that the Frankfurt School’s criticisms of positivism has influenced his work.

  According to Asante, the task for African Americans is to move beyond the Eurocentric idea to a place where transcultural, Afrocentric analysis becomes possible. He cautions against using a Eurocentric mode that accepts oppositional dichotomies as a reflection of the real world.29 His critique of the positivist tendency to split mind and body is cogent. Unfortunately, his theory also relies on a false dichotomy. Essentially, his categories, Afrocentric and Eurocentric, form an untenable binary opposition: Europeans are materialistic while Africans are spiritual; Europeans abort life while Africans affirm it.

  He is quite right to recognize the existence of a protest discourse that counters racist ideology. But he denies the way that these discourses are both multivocal and intertwined. As suggested above, the dialectic nature of discursive struggle requires that counter- and dominant discourses contest the same ideological ground.

  This point can be better understood by examining the roots of Asante’s Afrocentric thought. He consciously builds off Negritude and authenticity, philosophies devised explicitly to counter racist ideology and develop nationalist cohesion. V. Y. Mudimbe (1988) has exposed the nature of the binary opposition used by cultural nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s who explored their difference as blacks. Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire and other Francophone Africans and African Caribbeans relied on the spiritual/ materialistic dichotomy. Turned on its head, this is the opposition used against Africans during the late nineteenth century. As many have pointed out, this reversal of paradigms owed much to the celebration of the “noble savage” by such interwar European writers as Jean-Paul Sartre. Ironically, Western anthropologists, whom nationalists often disparage, also took an active role in this ideological “flip.” It was anthropologists such as Michel Griaule and Melville J. Herskovits who revealed to Western-educated intellectuals the internal coherence of African systems of thought.30 Equally important was the cross-fertilization of ideas between Africans, African Caribbeans, and African Americans. As a result of these three influences, “African experiences, attitudes, and mentalities became mirrors of a spiritual and cultural richness.”31 Far from cultureless savages, Africans had built the essence of spiritual culture.

  This reversal of the racist paradigms on Africa accompanied and contributed to the growth of the nationalist movements that ultimately freed the continent from formal colonial rule. The nature of African independence reflects the double-edged character of this nationalism. On the one hand, nationalism helped build the political coherence necessary to threaten European rule; on the other hand, it obscured class and gender divisions in a way that prevented them from being addressed fairly. Clearly, this nationalism shared much with a European brand of nationalism that envisioned a culture unequally divided along gender and class lines.

  Similarly, Asante does little to take us beyond the positivism that he criticizes, and his schema assumes a universality as broad as the Eurocentric discourse he shuns. Moreover, the Afrocentric ideology he uses depends on an image of black people as having a culture that has little or nothing to do with white culture. This is one of its major contradictions. On the one hand, nationalists like Asante have to prove to African Americans that Afrocentric ways are different from and better than Euro-American ways. Nationalists try to convince black people that they should begin to live their lives by this Afrocentric ideology. For example, some nationalists argue that African Americans should turn away from materialism to focus on the spiritual needs of the black community. Yet on the other hand, Asante and others argue that black culture is already based on an Afrocentric worldview that distinguishes it from Euro-American culture. Rather than being an ideology that African Americans must turn to, Afrocentric thought becomes inherent in black culture, and black people already live by these ways in opposition to dominant culture.

  I would argue instead that African American culture constantly interacts with dominant culture. Of course, black people do have their own ways not only because they protect themselves from penetration by white culture but also because they are creative. Nonetheless, blacks and whites all live together in the same society, and culture flows in both directions. Like the dominant culture, most African Americans believe that spirituality has a higher value than materialism at the same time that most of these people pursue material goals. If materialism were not considered crass by dominant society, Afrocentric critique would have little value. It is also important to note the extent to which white culture is influenced by African Americans. At an obvious level, we see black influence on white music with the most recent appearance of rap music on television and radio commercials. At a l
ess obvious level, Afrocentric critiques compel hegemonic forces to work at covering the reality of racist relations. Far from being an ideology that has no relationship to Eurocentric thought, nationalist ideology is dialectically related to it.

  What I find most disturbing about Asante’s work is his decision to collapse differences among black people into a false unity that only a simplistic binary opposition would allow. The focus on similarities between Africans and African Americans at the expense of recognizing historical differences can only lead to a crisis once differences are inevitably revealed. Moreover, his binary opposition cannot account for differences among Africans. Many eloquent African writers have warned us about the problems that came from accepting a false unity during the decolonization phase that has led to the transfer of local power from an expatriate elite to an indigenous one. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Sembene Ousmane, and Chinua Achebe would all warn us against such pitfalls.

  And, of course, we cannot face sexism with this false unity, as Buchi Emecheta, Sembene Ousmane, and Mariama Bâ movingly show. Asante does tell us that along with the move beyond the Eurocentric idea, we can develop a post-male ideology as we unlock creative human potential.” 32 Yet he has nothing more to say about gender in the entire book. It is hard to believe that this gesture toward black feminists needs to be taken seriously. It is to other Afrocentric thinkers that we must turn to understand more clearly what this discourse has to say about women.

  Among the most important nationalists the Journal of Black Studies publishes is Ron Karenga, the founder of Us. Some readers will remember him for his leadership role among cultural nationalists in ideological battles against the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s and for this pamphlet, The Quotable Ron Karenga. In Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert Allen quoted a critical excerpt from Karenga’s book, exposing its position on women and influencing many young black women (including myself) to turn away from this nationalist position.33